The fabric of space was not so structurally simple that it could genuinely be viewed as a piece of cloth. The metaphor was deeply flawed—as was often the truth when using analogies for magic of this tier. Comparisons to real-world ideas and concepts could serve as a framework to approach various theories from, a starting point for the mundane mind to begin grokking underlying mystical principles, but there was something fundamentally other when it came to the arcane that could not be explained in words.
Even if Vivi fully understood this bleeding-edge branch of magic—she didn't—and even if she'd taken extreme care cutting into the fabric when she'd removed the Red Tithe from reality—she hadn't—repairing the damage [Carve the Firmament] had done would still have been difficult. Vivi didn't even have the benefit of having been the person who had designed the spell. She likely understood the Shattered Oracle's work better than anyone in the world, but that man had been both uniquely genius and uniquely insane, and those two qualities made for very difficult-to-understand spell designs.
"[Carve the Firmament]."
Unlike the first time she'd cast the spell, she took her time wreaking havoc. Rather than hacking, sawing, and desperately ripping away the portion of space she'd targeted, Vivi took a sharp pair of tailor's scissors to the bolt of black silk holding the physical world together. She sliced as carefully as she could, and while doing so, she needed to sever the fabric in more directions than just up and down, back and forward, left and right. Even her immense intuition struggled to understand what she was doing at a fundamental level.
But that was fine. It was a learning exercise.
[Carve the Firmament] had clearly been created for excising and destroying indiscriminately, which meant trying to wrangle the attack spell into something neat and precise was twice as difficult. But Vivisari was quite good with magic, and so she managed.
The second hole she ripped into space, when it manifested, wasn't quite as gruesome to gaze upon… but only in the way one blood-spattered, gory murder scene might be 'less offensive' to the senses than another. She certainly didn't enjoy looking upon it, no matter how much tamer it was than the original.
Now, then. Actually fixing it.
She had a few angles she could approach the problem from. Continuing to use the fabric comparison, before she could stitch anything back together, she had to first find where that shredded patch of space had gone. Though honestly, Vivi didn't know whether it existed at all anymore. She didn't think space could truly be erased, and the more likely outcome was that it had simply been broken into small pieces and tossed aside into some… some other place… but not only did she have no hard proof for that theory, even if she was right, dredging up that missing chunk from whatever nowhere-zone it had gone to was going to be a headache and a half.
Nothing to do but try, and see where I can get.
Vivi lost herself in the effort over the next several hours. Gruesome and violative as making a mockery of fundamental laws of the universe was, she had a lot of fun with it. Her recent encounter with Remian reminded her to rein in her fascination, and she forced herself to go about her experiments cautiously and methodically even if she found enjoyment in the process. In a sad irony, true love for magic was both the source and downfall of most great mages.
Moderation, she warned herself every few minutes. Let's not accidentally become the next Cataclysm, Vivi.
First, by tweaking the spell over and over and carefully observing how the magical phenomenon manifested in various ways, she found where the void-stuff went. There was no worldly metaphor to draw: there was the logical, ordered expanse that she, and all other physical matter, existed in, where one meter in one direction was one meter in one direction. An organized grid.
Outside of that—a place she found only by tracing the ruined material as it was tossed away—was a yawning black void where such rules didn't exist. Where no rules existed. In that place, the cast-aside chunks of many [Carve the Firmaments] were easy to find, and though her mind strained to understand what she was seeing, she could even interact with them as she could with structured space.
With that achieved, it was time for step two: repairing those twisted chunks before she brought them back into the 'real world.'
It was a much easier mission than the previous one. As she worked, her perspective shifted: the space wasn't torn and ripped so much as it was bent, broken, and twisted in ways it shouldn't be. While the lost pocket had been separated from the rest of the world, the piece had been thrown away in one intact clump—just in a horribly warped shape. She improved with each successive repair, bending forty-six-degree angles into proper ninety-degree ones faster and faster. It wasn't long before she had cobbled together what she thought was a normal section of space again.
Then the third and final step: bringing the segment of space back to reality and stitching it where it belonged.
The ability to tear out space in such a complete manner was what made [Carve the Firmament] such an awful masterpiece to begin with, though. She barely understood how it worked even now. Thankfully, while healing wasn't always as simple as reversing damage—a burn could hardly be healed by freezing it—in the case of spatial dislocation, reverse-engineering the spell's carving mechanism provided an excellent starting point for how to seal the disparate pieces back together.
In the end, she cast around three dozen instances of [Carve the Firmament] and spent four hours experimenting. With how intrigued she was throughout the process, it honestly felt like a quarter of that time passed. Her spatial manipulation abilities had definitely improved in no small way… though mostly in subdomains that really shouldn't be delved into, arguably even in emergencies.
Gazing on the most recent of the black rents floating high above the clouds, Vivi pointed her staff and incanted:
"[Seal the Firmament.]"
And space obeyed. The spell burrowed into that empty, black refuse heap, found the ordered chunk of space that didn't belong, grabbed it, hammered it into proper shape, and slotted it where it had once been. Afterward, the patch of sky appeared to both her physical and magical senses as entirely normal. She floated through the healed patch of air without issue.
A complete success.
And so, all that remained was the final stage of experimentation. Using her new spell on a living test subject.
Five minutes later, she'd grabbed a fish from the ocean below, cast [Carve the Firmament] on it, and repaired the violated segment of space.
And she discovered something that didn't surprise her.
Despite only having been in that shredded pocket space for less than ten seconds, the creature was definitely dead—likely, she'd killed it the moment the spell had activated. She had no idea what kind of damage was wrought onto living beings when their bodies were mashed up with spatial magic, but regardless: even though it seemed unharmed, [Carve the Firmament] had killed the fish quite thoroughly.
Anxiety settled into her, though maybe it shouldn't have.
She experimented a little longer but eventually accepted reality. With a heavy feeling in her gut, she teleported back to Meridian and made for the Institute. Who knew, anyway? Maybe the Red Tithe's magical armor had better preserved him, or sapient, more whole creatures like humans interacted differently with the experience.
It was late at night, but not so late that she roused the Headmaster from sleep when she [Blinked] to his office and requested his presence through his secretary. Perhaps she could have waited until morning, but she wanted an answer as soon as possible. Especially since she didn't know for sure what happened to creatures caught inside [Carve the Firmament]. Now that she had a solution, she was morally obligated to use it as fast as she could, in case she was accidentally torturing the man even as she waited around.
A few minutes later, Lysander strode into the office looking put-together if tired. "Lady Sorceress," he said. "How may I help you?"
"Sorry for how late it is. I've formulated a spell that will reverse the damage done in the garden annex," Vivi told him. "In the unlikely case the Red Tithe is alive, I should fix it now, not later."
He digested that announcement with the usual display of thoughts rapidly flashing behind gray eyes. Finally, he nodded. "Archmage Theophania may not be entirely pleased—I understand that she's been enjoying this assignment. As any researcher would, getting to study esoteric phenomena in the comfort of their own home. But she will need to accept the loss of her current darling. The threat is best removed, and her expertise is needed elsewhere given the events that have transpired."
"I can answer some of her questions about spatial magic, if she wants," Vivi said. "But yes. I'm going to fix it. You don't need to be there, yet it's your Institute, so I'm of course informing you of my intentions."
"I will accompany you," he said in agreement.
She held a hand out. Lysander glanced at it and replied to the gesture with, "It's probable that there are still researchers inside the annex, despite the late hour. Shall I clear the room for you first?"
"Oh." Her hand dropped. "Yes, please do that." She'd already returned as the Sorceress in an official capacity, but not publicly, and she didn't want to deal with a room of gawking mages… especially when she might be pulling out a corpse in front of them.
A few minutes later, Lysander [Blinked] back into the office and extended a hand himself. Vivi let him teleport them both to the garden annex.
Her eyes locked onto the jagged black rent floating in the air.
The answer to a question she'd long been fearing was moments away. Seconds, really. The spell acted fast, as all magic wielded by her did. Her heart began to thump inside her chest.
Just do it. You already know what you're going to find.
She raised her staff, then hesitated and glanced at Lysander.
"You shouldn't try to study this spell," she said. "You'll just hurt yourself."
Despite the man's typical control, he visibly flinched. Vivi realized she'd been much blunter than she needed to be, but she was on edge, and she'd have been irresponsible to not give the warning. Lysander was a skilled mage, and extremely intelligent, yet he didn't have the tools or senses necessary to understand magic of this scale. He would be looking into the sun with a telescope.
"I didn't intend to," the man said, voice tight. "But thank you for the warning, Sorceress."
She almost apologized, but that might just be digging the hole deeper. Instead, she took a breath and refocused.
"[Seal the Firmament]."
There was no chance of miscasting or the spell not working properly; she wouldn't have come to the Institute unless she'd been certain she was ready. Like many times before, space healed itself right in front of her eyes. The black gouge disappeared, replaced with the chunk of the garden she'd torn out so many days ago.
The Red Tithe appeared along with it.
Only to immediately crumple to the ground.
Vivi stayed frozen for a moment, then spurred her feet forward. She walked up. The assassin had fallen on his back, and his pale face—obviously that of a corpse—made it instantly apparent that he was not simply unconscious. She cast a spell to confirm the fact anyway, stomach sinking at the result. The exact cause of his death was opaque… but he definitely was dead.
She'd been sure from the first instant she cast the spell that she'd killed the Red Tithe, so how was she surprised in the slightest? Maybe she'd been clinging a little too much to the delusion that he might, in some alien and unknowable way, have survived. The intuition of the most talented mage in the world would almost never be wrong, though. She should have known better. Even a miracle couldn't have saved this man. Certainly not his armor.
Though his survival, if it had happened, could hardly have been considered a miracle. There were few people who deserved capital punishment more than him. If he had somehow lived, Vivi would have captured him and turned him in to the crown without delay. The Red Tithe likely would have been executed within hours of that astonishing survival. Maybe, even, it was better this way.
"Incredible," Lysander said, oblivious to Vivi's thoughts. "You truly repaired it, and with a spell that took you mere days to formulate." Shaking his head in disbelief, he walked up next to her. His gray gaze lacked so much as an ounce of empathy as he stared down at the corpse. "The Red Tithe. You did the world a great service. The King of the Southern Kingdom put a bounty on this assassin of a sum that would make even other royalty choke. I'm not sure if you knew, but his son died by the Red Tithe's blade. King Edwin will weep when he hears the news."
Should that have lessened the dark and surreal sensations swirling inside her?
He grunted when Vivi didn't respond. "May I?" he asked, gesturing at the corpse.
She nodded.
He bent down and retrieved the dagger cupped in the assassin's limp right hand. Purple-and-black voidglass glinted as Lysander lifted the weapon to then turn it left and right, studying the material. "Both his armor and the dagger you spoke of survived the spatial dislocation, too. What an unblemished victory this is."
'Unblemished victory'?
She supposed that was even true. Not only was one of the most powerful assassins in the world gone for good, saving many lives in the future, but the mortal kingdoms would make enormous progress using the Duke's highest-tier voidglass projects as a base for study. That might save even more lives—possibly a countless number.
But for obvious reasons, it didn't feel like an 'unblemished victory.'
"I'll leave it in your care," Vivi said, finally managing to get her mouth working. "If you need me, contact me through Rafael."
Before Lysander could respond, she [Blinked] away.